Stepping Aside at an Operatic Oasis; Founding Director of the Santa Fe Opera Looks Back on 43 Years of Innovation

By ALLAN KOZINN

Published: September 6, 2000

SANTA FE, N.M.—
The costumes, props and scenery used in the Santa Fe Opera's five summer productions are being packed for storage, and the singers and choristers who held the spotlight are en route to their next engagements. But as the company's backstage staff wraps up the loose ends, a more figurative curtain is descending, slowly and gracefully, on a long stretch of the company's history. On Sept. 30, just as the new concert season gets under way in the world's arts centers, John Crosby will step down as the general director of this adventurous company, which he founded in 1957 and has run since.

Having built an opera house in the middle of the Southwestern desert and quickly established it as an important stop on the summer festival circuit, Mr. Crosby, 74, will turn over the reins to Richard Gaddes. As the associate general director for the last five years, Mr. Gaddes has been Mr. Crosby's right-hand man; and as the founder of a similar venture in St. Louis, he knows about running an opera company. He has invited Mr. Crosby to return to conduct Strauss operas, his specialty, next summer and in 2002. Otherwise Mr. Crosby is to exert no influence on the company.

''I think when you stop, you stop,'' Mr. Crosby said, speaking barely above a whisper throughout an interview in his office on the company's grounds here. ''I think it's very important that you recognize that you can't manage in the background. You can't be breathing down somebody's neck.''

That is not to say that relinquishing the company will be easy.

''Sometimes I think I haven't thought about anything else for 45 years,'' he said. ''I fall asleep worrying about it and wake up worrying about it.''

That worrying led to the creation of something unusual and, even today, slightly out of place here. The highway that runs past the company's grounds on a hill overlooking Santa Fe is otherwise known for casinos, Indian pueblos and glorious views of desert plateaus. A sign marks the company's home as a local landmark, yet some 65 percent of its audience comes from outside New Mexico. The company has mixed feelings about the imbalance, which Mr. Gaddes said he would like to redress.

A visitor to the company's comfortable, technologically up-to-date theater might not fully appreciate how daring was Mr. Crosby's notion of establishing a company here when he began contemplating it in the early 1950's. The wide highway that connects Albuquerque, the closest major airport, to Santa Fe was then a rustic two-lane road, and the drive that now takes 50 minutes took two and a half hours. More to the point, Santa Fe itself was not clamoring for an opera company. But Mr. Crosby said it had the kind of audience that would support one.

''First of all, and very important, Santa Fe had a long history of what I like to call hospitality to the arts,'' said Mr. Crosby, who was born in New York but began visiting Santa Fe as a child because its dry climate was good for his asthma. ''It was a community that had a flourishing art colony, if you will: painters, poets, writers, sculptors. And strangely, from that galaxy of the arts, music was rather missing. So it seemed to me that the community would receive this missing link warmly.

''The second thing was, you have to try and remember how different the world of classical music was in the summertime in the 1950's. It was nothing by comparison to today. So there was an abundance of unemployed classical music talent, both vocal and instrumental. Goodness, in our first season I think probably one-third of our orchestra was from the Metropolitan Opera. They had two choices, either to stay home and paint the house, or put the kids in the car and come out to Santa Fe for the summer.''

He assembled a company of 65 performers for his first season, which opened with ''Madama Butterfly'' on July 3, 1957, just a few days short of his 31st birthday. The budget that summer was $110,000, about $60,000 of which he had raised in donations, with the rest covered largely by ticket sales. For the season just ended the company had a payroll of 550 and a budget of $11 million.

Its home has expanded as well. Its first house was a 480-seat open air theater, which burned down in 1967. A theater seating 1,890 served the company for 30 years and was replaced in 1998 by a new 2,130-seat house designed by James Stewart Polshek and Partners of New York.

The company's real attraction, though, is its programming. Although it by no means neglected the standard repertory, contemporary and rarely staged works -- from Handel to Henze -- have won it an international audience. An early coup of Mr. Crosby's was persuading Igor Stravinsky to oversee the production of his ''Rake's Progress'' during the company's first season.

''I felt that it would not make sense to try to run a museum of opera in a small mountain town like Santa Fe,'' Mr. Crosby said. ''You can have all the 'Bohemes' and 'Carmens' you want in New York all winter, with brilliant international casts, and you don't have to come here to see them. But if you have an interest in some unusual things, then you will come along.''